


You're a fool

by b00mgh



Category: The Gifted (TV 2017)
Genre: Drugs, F/M, I tried for angst and got fluff somehow, clarice is bad at feelings, eclaris is mentioned, john is only slightly less awkward, mostly just thunderblink, there's some crack at the end, unstable portals are dangerous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 21:15:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12826254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b00mgh/pseuds/b00mgh
Summary: Oops, someone got John.He's taken by Sentinel Services while Clarice escapes. He manages to escape, but now he's heavily drugged and wandering in South Florida, so it's not really a comfort. Lucky for him, Clarice is very good at trying.





	You're a fool

“Clarice,” Lorna growls, “you’re not going anywhere until we have a plan.”

No one could really stop Clarice from portalling herself out of reach, if she was given enough time to create a portal, so the trick to keeping her in one spot was to not give her enough time to create a portal. It was becoming a truly formidable task, and one Lorna was rapidly tiring of.

Apparently, Clarice had stopped caring about whether or not the portal she wanted to fling herself through was stable enough to keep her in one piece. She just wanted to be doing something. 

It had taken her twelve hours to calm down this much: before that, she was screaming and kicking at anyone who would restrain her and literally clawing holes in space at random. They’d had to use Dreamer to threaten her into quieting herself, and they’d called Zingo to sit in her lap while she explained how  _ the woman was going to show us the refugees _ and then how  _ there were just corpses down there _ . Every time anyone asked, this was about where Clarice got choked up, she had nearly hyperventilated the first time, and someone (Caitlin) had to tell her in a soft voice that she was okay and safe and then Clarice practically broke in half and erupted with a fresh bout of sobs and a jarring  _ but they got John _ , which is when Lorna asks her to repeat herself and Clarice explains as best as she can through drowning that  _ John told me to open a portal but he didn’t go through _ , and when Marcos asks why in the hell he wouldn’t Clarice says it’s because  _ Sentinel Services was right there, the spider drones, they could have gotten through, he didn’t want to risk it, _ and while everyone else is absolutely floored, all Clarice can get out of her chest is tears and gasping breaths and  _ he’s so, so stupid _ . 

It’s been a rough twelve hours; everyone is entirely devoted to finding John, or even a vague idea of where he could be. Lorna is, and has been, pouring over past Sentinel Services tactics with Reed Strucker, and Clarice is, and has been, curled into a corner, flashes of purple dancing in her fingers when she thinks no one is looking. Sage is in the other room with Marcos, analyzing data files and monitoring radio chatter, respectively. Shatter is helping with guard duty, because if Sentinel Services has their leader, then they know the base is weak, and god knows the millions of ways they could have already extracted the base’s location from John.

It’s slow going. Most of the refugees don’t know what’s wrong yet, because telling them would only cause hindering panic, but some know something’s wrong, and there is a permeating sense of uneasiness in the whole building.

“That’s it, I’m going,” Clarice snaps, all in one breath. The manic is barely contained in a sheath of superficial resignation in her eyes.

Lorna groans loudly, because she’s already worried sick, and Clarice is not helping, Reed takes a breath and deals with it a little better than Lorna would have in the moment. “Clarice, you don’t know where you’re going,” he says patiently, “and you’re no good to anyone in pieces. When we figure out where John is, we’ll need you to portal us in there so we can get him fast and easy.” It speaks volumes to his optimism that he says “when” they find John and not “if.”

“I’ll just portal back to the last place I saw him,” Clarice reasons, “that psychotic old woman.”

Lorna pushes back her hair, her brow creasing and smoothing into feigned sarcasm, “And do what? Immediately getting captured by Sentinel Services does as much good as portalling yourself to pieces, maybe less.” Clarice’s arms uncross, one goes to rub viciously at her face like the water in her eyes has done her a personal grievance, and maybe it has. Lorna softens, “Look, Clarice, until we actually have John here– as in right next to us saying something militant and leader-like– think about anything you’re about to do, and ask yourself: if John  _ were  _ here, would he let you do it?” This gives Clarice enough pause for thought that Lorna and Reed can get back to their deliberation, and Clarice comes to the conclusion that, in fact, John would probably not let her create and then enter an unstable portal. He would tell her to wait until she had a clear destination and to wait until she had a team to go with her. 

John was such a safe guy.

 

John was not a very safe guy. At least, not at the moment.

He is strapped to a chair in a cage while a man in a labcoat asks him questions. The absolute egghead thinks that John– of all the people, John motherfucking Proudstar– will give up the mutant underground for a lessened prison sentence, or will even believe that prison is where he’s going. John has given him nothing, his mouth has stayed resolutely shut, and he’s got a good reason for it too. He thinks he can get some pretty sarcastic comments across tacitly anyways– that had better be the reason for the bruises billowing across his jaw and nose, otherwise he’s been getting some pretty solid punches for absolutely no reason. John might be pretty impervious, but when the chick throwing the punches is literally made of stone there is a solid argument against his immortality.

The labcoat smiles blankly, “Now, Mr. Proudstar, you’re a sensible man: each mutant underground location you give up is another four years off of your one-hundred-eighty-three year sentence. With all that you know, you could only be spending a few years in prison,” he spins on his heel, turning away from John, “given that you cooperate.” When he turns back to gauge John’s reaction, ‘Mr. Proudstar’ is smiling at the labcoat the way one smiles at a child doing something particularly useless, his eyebrow cocked high and his eyes patiently amused. This gets him a black eye from stone girl. 

Fortunately, John can do this all day. Even more fortunately, the labcoat can not do this all day– he has important patients to check on and business meetings to attend and paperwork to file, you know, the things you must do when operating an illegal organization as close to inside the law as you can.

He snaps at stone girl, “Give him the shot,” and watches as the needle digs into John’s jugular. Then both labcoat and stone girl leave John on the chair in the cage. He just overhears labcoat saying to someone outside “–should be about half an hour before he’s gone,” then he knows he’s on the clock. 

John has an escape plan, and it all hinges on them putting him in a ventilated, non-soundproofed room. If they did that, then Sentinel Services thought that he just had his strength, and aren’t counting on his enhanced senses or foresight. Also, it counted on him keeping his mouth shut, because he has a bobbypin under his tongue and these facile chains were only meant to hold him for a few hours while he was supervised, questioned, and drugged. It’s short work to spit the bobby pin into his left hand and undo the chain there before moving on to his right hand and then his feet and then he just bends the bars a little (because this lock has an alarm on it) to squeeze out of the cage, and suddenly John is free. 

He doesn’t bother with the door to the room, because the key convenience of a room with ventilation is that the duct is actually literally big enough for John to fit his whole person in it and crawl around, thereby avoiding all confrontation as well as delaying the recognition of his absence. Besides, fighting takes effort, and John is getting tired even as he kicks open a grating to the back side of the building. 

It all feels impossibly easy, too easy, as he dodges searching flood lights and makes a break for the nearby treeline. I mean, it feels that way until the drugs really kick it up a notch and leave him hurling up anything he’d eaten before into a bush. It’s hard to run after that, so he walks for a few minutes, and then it’s hard to walk so he stumbles until he falls down. He remembers that, before he had actually been taken down, he had fought pretty hard against some spider drones, and there’s the injuries to prove it. It hurts. Everything hurts. His face hurts and his insides hurt and his legs, his arms, his neck, his head hurts. His lungs hurt. His heart hurts.

He needs to find Clarice. Honestly, he just needs to find the mutant underground or any sympathizer at all, but Clarice comes to mind because John is very heavily drugged and he can’t think of anyone who would be a better rescue option. Clarice could just grab his hand and portal him home. He likes it when she grabs his hand, and that thought occupies his mind for several more minutes than it probably normally would have. 

 

“Guys,” Marcos shouts over the headphones muttering radio channels into his ears, “I think I’ve got him.” The room goes from empty to crowded in less than ten seconds. He answers before they ask, “Sentinel Services detention center just outside Cape Coral, Florida. They reported an escaped inmate with a skillset of inhuman strength and invulnerability. They’re saying he’s been drugged and should be easy to find.”

Shatter sighs heavily, fearfully. Sage hugs her shawl closer to herself. Lorna is almost ready to assemble a team, but Clarice asks– kindly, sweetly, a little nervously– “Where is that? Could you pull it up on Google Earth?” Sage does it instinctively, out of a habit of doing what she’s asked to. Clarice squints at the screen, “Could you zoom in right there? To street view?” Sage does it. 

They all should have known the moment that Clarice asked kindly, sweetly, a little nervously, because Clarice never does anything that way, but by the time Lorna sees the determination as hard as a diamond in Clarice’s jade eyes and realizes just how stupid it is to even try what Clarice is about to do, Clarice has already made a portal to that exact spot, as it appears on Google Earth, and flung herself through it. Everyone shouts expletives or cautions, but the portal is closed before the words are finished falling on those deaf ears. 

 

The southern tip of Florida is very cold in December at dusk. Who would have thought? John is shivering as he stumbles blindly through a rapidly darkening forest. The ground is soft under him, and his boots are sinking a bit with every step. Even the air is wet, and it begins to drizzle. The whole environment is miserable, and that’s without the drugs. Internally, John is panicking. His senses are dulled, not shut off entirely but dulled all the same, he can’t get his body and mind to cooperate, and he’s got these irrational bubbles of intense anxiety that he can’t wave off. John is terrified of a million different things, and at any other time he would ignore them or push through them, but right now they’re occupying all of his brain. 

He’s scared of the dark. He’s scared of being alone. He’s scared of Sentinel Services finding him again. He’s scared of wandering aimlessly and never being found. He’s scared of whatever this drug is doing. He’s scared of his friends being found and taken away while he’s gone. He’s scared of them getting hurt. He’s scared that he’ll never see them again. 

Before he knows it, John is sitting down again, crying and shaking uncontrollably. He wants to go home. He wants to see someone he knows. Clarice. 

After several long minutes, John reminds himself that Clarice is coming to get him. She has to be, Clarice is always there for him whether he needs it or not, and this time is no exception. 

The train of thought makes very little logical sense, but in John’s defense the amount of drugs they gave him should have made him pass out fifteen minutes ago; he’s awake on willpower, and most of that willpower comes from this illogical certainty that Clarice  _ will _ find him. So John remembers that he’s got to get to somewhere Clarice can find him, he stands up, and he continues to tremble through the forest until he sees lights in the spaces between trees.

That’s a place. That’s a place with people. Lights mean that John can see easier. He reaches the tree break, a road, and he pushes forward to a gas station, where he sits down against a wall, breathing heavily and crying again.

Someone is running, not very close to John, but he can hear a lot in a place with no one else around. The footfalls are uneven, the person is favoring one foot. The breathing is labored, the person has been running a while. They are coming closer, John isn’t sure who it is, and he gets up to run away. He’s too wobbly to do that though, so when he tries to stand he just falls over. His legs feel like jelly. He’s terrified again, crying again, shaking again. He can’t hear the running anymore over the sound of his own roaring heartbeat, his hoarse breathing.

He can’t hear anything else until he hears his own name in the sweetest tones.

“John?” Clarice murmurs, and John hears that and his eyes shoot up to see her. She’s covered in cuts and bruises, her shoulder is dislocated, her ankle is sprained, there’s a gash dripping blood from her cheek. 

“Clarice?” The tears start up fresh, they’re spilling down his face and his hands are shaking too bad to be much help in wiping them away. She came to get him. “What happened?” He slurs, reaching up to touch her cheek. He misses, but she grabs his hand and he holds onto that.

She shrugs with the shoulder that isn’t dislocated. “Unstable portal,” she tells him nonchalantly.

She doesn’t tell him that she’s lucky to have survived, or that the cut on her cheek was the result of almost getting a really short haircut, but he seems to understand something of it anyways and he starts crying and shaking again, “You’re a fool.”

Now Clarice is worried for John, because it’s he shouldn’t be shaking like that no matter how cold it is, and the usually stoic sonuvabitch won’t stop sobbing, and his face looks like he lost a fight with a rhinoceros. “Sh, sh, John.”

“You’re a  _ fool _ , Clarice.”

“Yep, I know. Sorry for coming to save your ass.”

“I knew you’d come, but why did you have to get hurt to get here? That hurts my feelings.”

“How in the hell does that hurt your feelings?”

“Be _ cause _ –”

“You know what, you’re probably delirious right now. They drugged you, right?”

“Cla _ rice _ . It  _ hurts. _ My  _ feelings _ .” John insists.

Rolling her eyes, Clarice releases John’s hand before spreading a portal into the open air and then taking his hand again, even though she doesn’t really need to, and guiding him through it while he is still crying like an infant and shaking like he is trying to vibrate. 

She’s brought them to the backyard of the bank. It’s beginning to dawn on her, now that the adrenaline and initial relief have worn off, that she is exhausted as  _ fuck _ and hurts pretty much everywhere. John is still staring at her quizzically, squinting his eyes like he’s staring at the sun. 

“Clarice,” John’s speech is slurring even more now, “I love you a lot.”

“Okay, sure you do, let’s go inside.”

The building is pretty quiet inside, most everyone is asleep. When they reach the common area, John decides that he has made it home and cannot stand another second and that it is time for a nap and that Clarice needs a nap too, so he plops himself down on an unoccupied couch and brings Clarice down with him.

“What are you doing.”

“Clarice,” John says her name around six times, with varying levels of clarity, before answering anything else, “Clarice, I’m tired.”

She doesn’t want to admit that she’s tired, but she is, and so she doesn’t fight that hard to get back up on her feet. She just kind of sits there, and then John curls his arms around her. He’s asleep the moment his head hits the makeshift pillow he’s made out of her shoulder. After that, it gets really hard to get up, and that is actually mostly because there is about 190 pounds of deadweight trapping Clarice where she is. Everything hurts like hell, and she should probably at least get her sprained ankle and dislocated shoulder looked at before she falls asleep, but she seriously can’t get up, so she’s asleep soon too. She really doesn’t mind being this close to him. It’s nice.

An irate Lorna and a stressed Marcos find the pair of them like that around half an hour later as they were about to send out a team to find them. They don’t wake them up because at that point it’s too dark to see that Clarice’s cuts are sort of staining the couch or that some of her body parts are at abnormal angles, and they’re so tired that they just go to bed themselves.

 

John wakes up first, drugs having worn off, allowing him to remain ever the early riser. He remembers very little from the night before, and most of it is soaked in terror and shadows, so he is very confused as to how he came to be waking up curled around a Clarice who looks more like a chewed up pipe cleaner than a human being. “Oh shit.” He mutters, and it’s loud enough to wake up Clarice. The first thing she does is grimace painfully, and John immediately untangles his limbs and backs up, even though he’d rather stay exactly as close to her as he was. 

“What happened?” He asks, and that terror from last night is ebbing into today.

Clarice’s face stays pinched, “Yep. Nope. Before we handle that, can we go find Caitlin?” The words are spat through gritted teeth. 

John nods quickly, “You stay here,” he says it like she could move, “I’ll go, um, I’ll go find Caitlin.”

“Thanks.”

It takes Caitlin half an hour to pop Clarice’s shoulder back in, give her a sling for that, wrap up the sprained ankle, stitch up her cheek, apply some bandaids to the bigger abrasions, and give her a painkiller to eat with breakfast. It takes another half hour for her to receive a tongue-lashing from Lorna, Marcos, Sage, and Shatter, and then for both of them to explain exactly what happened.  _ Then _ they go grab some cereal and eat on the same couch they had slept on. 

Clarice pauses between bites. “You said you loved me,” she tells John with a smirk.

John shrugs, “I do.” There’s nothing awkward about it, he says it like you’d say ‘the sun is hot,’ or ‘water is a liquid.’ Apparently, this is just a fact that Clarice had not been privy to. 

“Oh,” she replies, then “oh…  _ oh _ . Wait,” she stutters, “you’re serious?” He nods, his mouth too full of cereal to elaborate. “You love me? Like, for my personality?”

John barely avoids spewing milk from his nose, he’s laughing so hard. “I mean, yes.” 

Clarice’s eyes narrow skeptically, “Is this a prank? You’re not usually a prankster, but–”

“Clarice, it’s not a prank or a lie or anything else.” John insists, putting down his cereal. “I love you, Clarice.”

“Oh,” she replies, then “Hang on, wait, you  _ asshole _ !” 

“ _ What _ ?”

“Why didn’t you tell me,” Clarice cries, “I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that you weren’t interested for weeks!” 

“What, why?”

“Self-confidence issues!” This comes from neither Clarice nor John, but instead from Andy Strucker, who is smirking mischievously at them from above his own bowl of cereal in a chair across the room.

“Andy, manners.” Caitlin calls from the doorway to the med bay.

“Guys, shut up, they’re trying to have a conversation,” Lorna snaps from where she is leaning on a rail above them. Marcos is next to her laughing into his hand.

Clarice and John realize this was a very bad spot to have this discussion. In their defense, they both thought they were just going to be eating cereal. 

Lauren comes out from behind a support pillar and actually sits down in front of them, “Let me get this straight: you loved each other, as in not just ‘like-like,’ but  _ love, _ and didn’t do anything for weeks because John thought he was being obvious and Clarice thought she didn’t have a chance?”

“Okay, when you say it like that it sounds stupid,” Clarice mutters roughly.

John has gone red in the ears, and refuses to speak.

“You know what, we’re finishing this outside,” Clarice throws open a portal and tugs herself and John through. There’s just no way that either of them could talk when everyone else was throwing in their two cents.

“Caitlin said you shouldn’t be walking on your ankle.”

“I’m standing.”

“Stubborn.”

“Pot, kettle.”

“Fair.”

Silence rings. Eventually, John says “Clarice, I love you… a lot.”

Still feeling like this was all some sort of dream or setup, Clarice just nods and says “Ditto.”

John takes this admission with the gravity it’s dealt with, “I want to be with you.”

“That, um, that sounds like a good plan,” Clarice says with a nod. There’s butterflies everywhere, in the metaphorical sense. After several more long seconds of silence, Clarice clarifies, “So we’re dating now?”

“Yes?”

“Perfect,” there’s a bright grin on Clarice’s face, “but can we go back inside? It’s cold out here and I want to finish my cereal.”

“Absolutely.”

They go back inside, eat their cereal, answer more questions than they want to from their friends, and figure the rest out as they go along.


End file.
